Magnavox Videogames and the Entertainment Revolution Trigger Happy manual Happiness is a warm gun

Trigger Happy

Happiness is a warm gun

Perhaps the purest, most elemental videogame pleasure is the heathen joy of destruction. You’ve got your finger hovering over the trigger, you line up an enemy and you fire. Such is the task presented by that venerable videogame genre, the shoot-’em-up. Space Invaders (see fig. 1) was not the first shoot-’em-up (Atari’s Tank preceded it in 1974, and of course Spacewar itself involved torpedo firing), but it was revolutionary all the same. You control a laser turret that can move from side to side at the bottom of the screen. Farther up, a phalanx of fifty-five evil aliens tramps across the screen in a smug dance of death. When they reach one side of the screen, they all descend one space and go back the other way. Your task is simple: fire at will, and wipe them out.

Not so simple, though, because they are raining bombs on you. You must dodge the bombs, or let your four shields soak up the firepower. The shields, however, crumble with every blast and are soon shot through with holes, offering as much protection from the merciless army above as a white handkerchief. As you shoot off the invaders, their colleagues do not panic, they do not break formation; in their infinite, ego-less confidence they just move a little faster, and faster still. They must not reach the bottom of the

46